Where The Mockingjays Go
by Marrya'sUniverse
Summary: AU ending - set at the end of Mockingjay, Peeta is dead. Gale is gone. And today came the final blow. . . Warning: sad, but beautiful. Sensitive themes.


**Hey, if you want to know a song that goes with this piece, listen to 'I Will Be Blessed' by Ben Howard while reading or after, if you like. Listen to the lyrics – they match with bits from this story.**

**Oh, and for those of you who have checked out my story 'Flying to the sun' on FictionPress, then yes, it is based on that, but has been expanded and made relevant to the Hunger Games and is, in my opinion, infinitely better ;)**

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Keep on running, I whisper to myself. Keep on running. My feet pound the hard packed dirt and something in my heart breaks free and soars with the birds flying overhead. My mind is a whirl but I don't stop to let myself think or even wonder why I'm running or what I'm trying to escape. I burst past startled people – the ones who returned to build district 12 after I killed President Coin and the whole world thought I'd gone insane – people pushing wheelbarrows full of rubble and medics zipping up the burnt-black corpses that are still being found even after two years of peace into body bags, but I don't think about who these bodies might have once belonged to and I don't apologise as I push through them, I just run. I just run.

Finally I escape the choking, ash-covered confines of the streets and houses, and I erupt out into the Meadow, my feet crushing brittle tendrils of grass and delicate waving wildflowers alike –heedless, or just not-caring of the destruction I usually try to avoid - that I'm leaving in my wake. There's no electric fence to wriggle under now – it's been long since torn down by Gale's old crewmate Thom and the other men who survived to return – so I just carry on running. Running and running and never stopping, pushing aside low-hanging branches and vines that get in my way. Through the green, healing forest that throws memories out at me with every step I take. Memories of you and Gale . . . Memories that burn and that cause me to choke back sobs because they're memories of things that will never happen again. Over the damp, foliage-covered ground until my feet hit rock and I'm out in the open with the sun beating hard on my back and the sky shining white-blue overhead. I'm scrambling over boulders to reach the place where I've spent so many hours sat talking to Gale, with nothing inside me but the thought of getting away from life, away from the district and all the vindictive, uncaring people in the world. Away from my choking, swallowing-me-up-inside grief and my raw, throbbing pain.

My breathing is laboured now, but after all the time I've spent training to prepare for the arena I'm fit enough and strong enough to force my body to keep moving even when it's on the brink of exhaustion. I look back at the district behind me without stopping because I know that if I do stop I'll be forced to think about what I've left behind and that would be bad. The rocky outcrop I'm onis a hill and the district houses can be seen distantly behind me, and then they're gone, obscured by a rise in the land, so instead of looking behind me I look ahead.

Then I reach it. I burst through a tangled coppice of trees onto our ledge, my arms flailing as I regain my balance and take in the sheer drop beneath me. I look over the lush green valley and the sunset the colour of muted orange before me, the yellow and the red and the pale-pink colours stretching and filling the horizon so beautiful they make me gasp and fall to my knees. If only you were here now . . . if only you could see our two colours, wonderfully and beautifully entwined on this day, this day to end all days. Tears roll down my cheeks and fill my mouth with their salty taste of pain, and I suck in deep breaths of wild-garlic and honeysuckle scented air as I drown in the memories that overwhelm me when I think of your lips and your touch and your smile. My heart wrenches as I remember the last time I was with you, holding you, smoothing your hair and kissing your mouth and your eyelids while President Snow's last, triumphant move – the secret poison in your veins – claims your life and you breathe your last breath. Checkmate.

A mockingjay sings overhead and I look up to watch it fly towards to the orange sun. I heard that in Rue's district they believe that when you die the mockingjays carry your soul to the next life. I wonder if that's where you are now. I stand up and whisper your name – your name that I can no longer whisper to you when I'm wrapped in your arms at night - and then I cry it out. But you can't hear me because you're in the place where the mockingjays go and for me heaven no longer exists because you're not here and I'm not in your arms.

I take a step forward and look towards the sun where the mockingjay is now nothing more than a mere speck against its orange glare. Suddenly I feel calm envelop me, and I know what I'm going to do - what I was intending to do since I first set out for this place. Now that Haymitch is gone – I found him face down in a pool of liquor this morning, dead – I no longer have any promises left to fulfil, no more obligations you've held me to, and I'm free. If Haymitch was still around I'd stay, because in a strange way he'd become the only family I'd had, and maybe I did love him, but there's nothing tying me to this world anymore, no reason for me to stay. Gale is married and no longer needs me - living the life of luxury in District 2 - and my mother passed away two years ago shortly after my sister's death, from grief.

My toes curl around the edge of the rock and I'm looking at the shadows of the miniature trees below me, stretching out long and delicately dark across the miles and miles of rolling hills and forest before me, and it's an aching desolate thing that I feel - to be among such beauty and know such pain. I think of all the people whose lives have been sacrificed to the Games, and to the Capitol, and to the bloody, brutal Mockingjay wars. Prim, Finnick, Johanna, Boggs, Mitchell, Homes, Castor, Pollux, Tigris, Leeg 1 and Leeg 2, Jackson, Mesalla, Darius, Wiress, Brutus, Seeder and Chaff and Mags, Cinna and Portia, Cato and Clove, Glimmer, Rue, Thresh, Foxface and countless other nameless people - and older ones. The tributes from previous years and the families and friends and loved ones of all the people who'd ever dared stand up to the Capitol in the past. And I look at this new world, at this new world rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the old and I know that I can no more be a part of it than I can stop loving you, because no matter how much I wished differently – and I don't, because that would mean I'd have never met you, or Cinna and Rue and all the others – I know that I am part of the old world and that this is the new.

The aching in my chest increases tenfold and I feel as if my heart will burst out of my ribs, like a bird from a cage, because I know that this is right, this is the right thing to do and that soon I'll be with you and that mockingjay, flying free.

I give one last parting gift to the world before I go, and I sigh in release as I hear the forest beneath me and around me and over me and on the hillsides beside me erupt with Rue's song as thousands upon thousands of mockingjays take up my call. Tears spring to my eyes, and for a moment I think of my life and of you, but not for too long because it's too excruciating and too painful and I'm frantic to be with you. And with Rue's tune ringing in my ears and no more thoughts left to think or promises to fulfil, I step off the cliff, because I know that it will bring me closer to you, and I fall through layers of the sunset and the sky to my destiny; to you.

And stars explode in my eyes and galaxies collide and somewhere not far away a child sings.

And I'm flying free.

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**If you felt anything – anything at all – while reading this, please click on the review button below and let me know, or PM me. **

**What do you think of Katniss's suicide? Angry at me killing off Peeta? Prefer my ending over Ms. Collins? Plain didn't get it? Reviews, as always, are welcome.**


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